Evaluation of the Sequencing and Merging Procedures at Three European Airports Using Opensky Data

Abstract

With the development of aircraft equipment, conventional navigation shifted towards performance-based navigation (PBN) procedures, which significantly improved the efficiency of airport arrivals. Availability of the open-access Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data enables research targeting careful and detailed analysis of the arrival performance. In this work, we demonstrate how we use historical data provided via Opensky Network to investigate various aspects of arrival performance at three European airports implementing different sequencing and merging techniques (Dublin, Stockholm-Arlanda, and Vienna). We create a number of datasets of different size and features, and apply a set of performance metrics characterizing horizontal and vertical efficiency, sequencing and metering effort, as well as environmental efficiency at the chosen airports.